Coding wise, why is internet explorer rather slow?
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Most browsers today are made with the very language this site is based on, c++. I read older internet explorer was made with javascript, is this the cause of it's notorious lack of speed?
C++ is not the why anything is slow.
Badly written c++ can be just as slow as anything else, of course.
Bad plug ins can slow it down too, moving the problems away from M$, eg flash player disabled / not installed can double the speed of page loads (for most any browser).
Its hard to say. Ive got edge now, with winx, and it runs fast enough, but that isn't saying much as my home pc is like a cray when comparing it to what the original IE ran on. It could be brute forcing past the bad code, or it could be they did a better job with the latest flavor. Im also running very fast network.
Badly written c++ can be just as slow as anything else, of course.
Bad plug ins can slow it down too, moving the problems away from M$, eg flash player disabled / not installed can double the speed of page loads (for most any browser).
Its hard to say. Ive got edge now, with winx, and it runs fast enough, but that isn't saying much as my home pc is like a cray when comparing it to what the original IE ran on. It could be brute forcing past the bad code, or it could be they did a better job with the latest flavor. Im also running very fast network.
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"The internet" is not the same beast it was 15, 10, or even 5 years ago. The way browsers interact with the web has changed, and significantly.
For an analogy, I can write a slick, highly-optimized set of routines to do video graphics with an old VGA card in VESA modes.
A modern, plain-vanilla, VGA-compatible card that comes with your US$400 PC will get far better performance using the Windows DirectX drivers than the code I write. Why?
The way the card is used and designed for use has changed.
Of course, from our point of view we still see pretty pictures on the screen, and nice text, etc. But the way it works underneath is a wholly different pipeline.
Nearly 10 years ago Mozilla made a name for itself by doing some heavy optimizations to make your browsing experience appear much snappier. Website design now encourages you to use constructs that increase speed. And behind the scenes, web browsers do stuff to do batch requests and defer requests that are not instantly necessary. You probably notice most when you load a page and the ads appear a moment after you've already started reading the content. All modern browsers are now aware of these things.
IE is a very old and mature piece of software. Much of the perceived slowness is due to Microsoft's preference to remain as backwards-compatible as possible by default, where many other browsers have things IE supports out-of-the-box turned off by default. Turn off all those things in IE, and it performs comparably well.
IE was written in C++. Microsoft made much of their business on C++, and a lot of COM and ActiveX components were written in and marketed as C++ stuff — all of which was an integral part of IE / the OS. (Remember the uproar MS haters had over that?)
Likewise, Javascript was written as an integrated component of IE, and like IE itself, the JRE was written in: C and C++.
The point of a scripting language (like Javascript) is to open programmable functionality to a program, like internet browsers, and CAD programs, and image manipulation programs, and 3D modeling software, and IDEs, and even plain-old text editors. Pick any nice, complex piece of development software and you are almost guaranteed to have some kind of scripting language integrated for plugins and the like.
ECMAscript was designed for manipulating HTML/XML structures. Hence it is part of modern web site design, and any useful browser is expected to be able to handle it gracefully.
Javascript itself is a poor choice to design a piece of software like IE, though I suppose it could be done, if only because it requires a working browser in order to function anyway.
(BTW, “Javascript” is an implementation of the ECMAscript specification.)
Hope this helps.
For an analogy, I can write a slick, highly-optimized set of routines to do video graphics with an old VGA card in VESA modes.
A modern, plain-vanilla, VGA-compatible card that comes with your US$400 PC will get far better performance using the Windows DirectX drivers than the code I write. Why?
The way the card is used and designed for use has changed.
Of course, from our point of view we still see pretty pictures on the screen, and nice text, etc. But the way it works underneath is a wholly different pipeline.
Nearly 10 years ago Mozilla made a name for itself by doing some heavy optimizations to make your browsing experience appear much snappier. Website design now encourages you to use constructs that increase speed. And behind the scenes, web browsers do stuff to do batch requests and defer requests that are not instantly necessary. You probably notice most when you load a page and the ads appear a moment after you've already started reading the content. All modern browsers are now aware of these things.
IE is a very old and mature piece of software. Much of the perceived slowness is due to Microsoft's preference to remain as backwards-compatible as possible by default, where many other browsers have things IE supports out-of-the-box turned off by default. Turn off all those things in IE, and it performs comparably well.
IE was written in C++. Microsoft made much of their business on C++, and a lot of COM and ActiveX components were written in and marketed as C++ stuff — all of which was an integral part of IE / the OS. (Remember the uproar MS haters had over that?)
Likewise, Javascript was written as an integrated component of IE, and like IE itself, the JRE was written in: C and C++.
The point of a scripting language (like Javascript) is to open programmable functionality to a program, like internet browsers, and CAD programs, and image manipulation programs, and 3D modeling software, and IDEs, and even plain-old text editors. Pick any nice, complex piece of development software and you are almost guaranteed to have some kind of scripting language integrated for plugins and the like.
ECMAscript was designed for manipulating HTML/XML structures. Hence it is part of modern web site design, and any useful browser is expected to be able to handle it gracefully.
Javascript itself is a poor choice to design a piece of software like IE, though I suppose it could be done, if only because it requires a working browser in order to function anyway.
(BTW, “Javascript” is an implementation of the ECMAscript specification.)
Hope this helps.
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